digital dreaming
the backrooms, digital dualism, and the uncanny dreams of our technodystopia
Long time no see, Substack. I’ve been busy, really busy, like, 20,000 words of academic writing busy. I’m embarrassed to have neglected this blog for two months; if you’ve missed my writing, you can find my recent reviews in the LARB and Reviews in History, and I have a forthcoming essay in the London Magazine, which you can preorder here. Also for the reasons stated above, this essay is a bit of a meander, a barely-edited ramble hinged on a dream. It contains very minor spoilers for Severance. Anyway:
Not long after we returned from the first trip to Switzerland, I dreamt of the Spaghetti Restaurant in Lugano where we’d spent one uneventful dinner. I guess it was off season, it had been quiet. We’d stumbled upon the restaurant; maybe we argued on the way, maybe we didn’t. I was possibly ten years old. I might have been nine, or eleven. In photos from the trip I’m wearing a stripy tank top and my hair is blonder than it ever was again. It was a warm evening, light just fading, the last few years before European summers boiled over into a migraine’s aura of heat. The spaghetti was good, I remember that. It must have been the first time I’d eaten real Italian food, real olive oil in the Pomodoro sauce. I wanted to go back the next day, I don’t think we did. Maybe it was our last night in Lugano.
But I dreamt of it again soon after, and I’ve been remembering that dream ever since, intermittently, so much so that I wonder if I dreamt the Spaghetti Restaurant, and dreamt the glassy boutiques and winding streets of quiet Lugano. Sometimes over the years I’ve said to my parents— Do you remember, and usually they don’t. My sister is the one with the memory, dredging up decades-old insults and jokes, while I appear to be stuck with inventions and blank spots where I should have adolescence. But we did visit Lugano, which is a ‘pleasant’ city according to Google Search. I remember nothing other than its pleasantness although I know my father, who visited as a child, was disappointed. I mostly played Club Penguin on the hotel computer and, after an angry Swiss businessman shooed me out, my dad’s clunky work laptop. There was a boulevard by the water. There was a fountain in the bay; or maybe that was in the sixties, or just in the dream. In the dream I was looking for the Spaghetti Restaurant, and I was lost, but not scared. The streets were empty. The streets were familiar.
A place for people which has no people in it. This is often the premise of a dream. It is also, often, the premise of horror. Both are defined by a sense of the uncanny, or the unheimlich or unhomely, that which is strange yet oddly familiar, which unsettles us in the not-quiteness of its reality.
When I think back to that dream of Lugano, or subsequent dreams of physical places I know I am unlikely to ever visit again, I wind up thinking of the IT Rooms at my junior and high schools. Even just the words ‘IT Room’ or ‘ICT Suite’1 conjure up the same sort of beige-tinted, hayfevery memories as those nostalgia accounts on Instagram — you know the ones, which post blurry shots of Fab ice lollies and cassette tape players and kids with coloured plastic braided into their hair. As a kid in the nineties or noughties, the IT Room was more likely than not the site of your first encounter with the digital world.
I might be wrong but I guess they don’t really exist anymore. The term ‘ICT’ certainly doesn’t — it was replaced in the British National Curriculum by ‘Computing’ in 2013, a year after I entered secondary school. That year, we still used our new IT Room, which was bright and shiny with glossy PCs. But within the year my school was switching to Dell Laptops which circulated between classrooms and trial-running student iPads. I had a phone in Year 6, a purple Nokia brick with texting and Snake and not much else, which I adored. By Year 8, I was yearning for an iPhone. I wanted my own mini ICT suite in the palm of my hand.
Like typing pools, with their orderly rows of secretaries at typewriters, IT Rooms were a physical space which mediated between humans and technology. Specifically, they were a pedagogical environment for children learning to engage with an emerging and ever-expanding digital space. Also like typing pools, they’ve been swept away by the exponential pace of twenty-first century technological advancement, and the ever-increasing personalisation and integration of handheld, portable, even wearable communication devices. When I was a kid, if I wanted to use a computer at school I had to wait for ICT class or lunch break, where our usage was carefully monitored, so we’d hide Friv flash games behind half filled-out Word documents. At home, I’d beg my parents for an hour a day on our family laptop. Now I’m writing this on the laptop I spent ten hours a day staring at, the iPhone I’m inseparable from pinging intermittently by my side, the radio on in the background. I’m at my desk but I could be anywhere; in the library or a cafe with my headphones in, in front of the TV at my parents’ house. I can’t remember the last time I set foot in an IT Room. Perhaps for a WiFi induction in my undergrad freshers week, in a basement suite which was perpetually cold, gloomy, and dead empty.
Lately I’ve been imagining these vanished places all stitched together and sprawling into the distance, like the endless reflections in a mirrored elevator. Just thousands upon thousands of IT Rooms and home offices, with their clunky desktop computers and keyboards and, oh my God, mouse mats (mice mats?) and those weird cut up cereal boxes you covered your hands with when you learnt to touch type for the first time. A thousand warm monitors blowing hot air onto your ankle sock clad legs, a thousand tinny speakers coated in dust which smelt like plastic, like a second hand car, the sort with a tape player. Clicking and unclicking a thousand CD trays. This IT Room which isn’t stretches out into oblivion. Like the hotel computer booths where I once played Club Penguin (and like Club Penguin itself), it’s a relic of a past which came and went quicker than you can say ‘The End of History’. But its own relics must persist somewhere, surely.
Computers can and should be recycled, but as with most of our consumer commodities, with their built-in obsolescence, they’re often not. Business Waste estimates that in the UK, ‘around 12 million computers and laptops have ended up in landfill over the past five years’, while ‘businesses and individuals in the USA throw away around 41 million computers every year’. The IT Rooms of my childhood lie broken in landfill, destined to rot out their days as they long outlast ours, seeping out their hazardous lifeblood into the soil. When I think of them I think of the ruined Earth in the film Wall-E, or the ominous walls of plastic tat collapsing over global landmarks in the harrowing 2024 Netflix documentary Buy Now: The Shopping Conspiracy, both images which have haunted me over the past year. Strange, too, imagining the IT Room empty, like the streets of Lugano in my dream. The people and technology within it displaced elsewhere. Strange, to think that accessing the digital realm was once something you did in the company of embodied others, sat side by side on your school lunchbreak or in the library or a hotel booth or a cybercafe, rather than alone, phone in hand, airpods in ears, physically and metaphysically plugged in. What theorists like Nathan Jurgenson2 and Legacy Russell3 term ‘digital dualism’, the oft-assumed separation between on and offline realms, is a fallacy. The IT Room of the 2020s exists in the haptic interface between your fingertips, eyes, brain, and the screen; clunky cables have been replaced by micro-electric wiring and its corporeal counterpart, our neural connections.
My vision of these spaces — the ghostly physicality of the converted computer suites, and the derelict digital zones of sites like my once-beloved Club Penguin or defunct early forums — leads me further away from my dream of Lugano and down into the Backrooms. An internet urban legend or ‘Creepypasta’ which emerged on a 2019 4Chan thread about unsettling images, the Backrooms refer to a vast, endless expanse of empty and uninhabited office space lurking in a dimension below our own. The original 2019 post gives you an idea of the concept:
If you're not careful and noclip out of reality in the wrong areas, you'll end up in the Backrooms, where it's nothing but the stink of old moist carpet, the madness of mono-yellow, the endless background noise of fluorescent lights at maximum hum-buzz, and approximately six hundred million square miles of randomly segmented empty rooms to be trapped in. God save you if you hear something wandering around nearby, because it sure as hell has heard you.
In 2022 a short series based on the concept was released on YouTube, and later optioned for film. The Backrooms have gained additional attention lately, though, after Severance creator Dan Erickson cited them as an influence on the hit show in which office workers undergo surgical separation between their work and home lives. The Backrooms feel like a peculiarly 2020s myth, the same way Slenderman, once the Creepypasta du jour, feels to have sprung from the stranger danger anxieties of my childhood. If Slenderman was about the terror of meeting a malicious unknown out in the woods at night, the Backrooms have grown out of a different collective anxiety; that of the endless inside, the endless empty, the lack of a light at the end of the tunnel. The physical spaces humans once inhabited, but have since abandoned, the spaces which were once quotidian, but now are lost. An enforced self-isolation in a place which should be populated, a ghost trapped in the wrong machine.4
Severance is just the most prominent piece of media associated with the Backrooms. Other artists, cinematographers, and content creators have been creating similarly eerie media. The Instagram page @kilmaruig deploys what I assume is a combination of clever shooting and editing techniques to depict an ‘empty world’, in which busy public locations are somehow empty of people save the user’s POV. You know the videos aren’t real — one is filmed near my old workplace, and familiar shops are clearly shut prior to opening in the early morning — but there’s something chillingly compulsive about them nonetheless. What would it really be like, if you woke up in an empty world, or, in the language of the Backrooms, ‘no-clipped’ out of this one? Like the Dead Mall Walking YouTube channel or r/deadmalls forum on Reddit, dedicated to images of ‘malls in their dead, dying, abandoned or currently being demolished state’, its hard not to see @kilmaruig’s videos as an eerie premonition of our planet’s future: mass human extinction, with our insurmountable junk left behind like a plastic Ozymandias. There’s even an internet neologism for the phenomenon, one I’m surprised didn’t become more mainstream during the pandemic: kenopsia, ‘the eerie atmosphere of a place that is usually bustling with people but now abandoned’.
Part of the appeal of Severance comes from this eerie atmosphere; the endless identical hallways and pristine desks covered in tarpaulins, the mass-produced plastic knick-knacks and snacks which serve as incentives, and the way friends and colleagues mysteriously vanish, their workspaces removed and personal affects replaced. Clunky-looking, old school technology and design sits within an uber-slick technodystopia in which Lumon is both a pharmaceuticals and biotech company, and a good old-fashioned cult. Lumon takes Marx’s theory of alienation under capitalism to the next level, literally severing workers from the products of their labour, the outside world, and their own complete identities. And not only are the severed staff alienated and oppressed by the conditions of their labour, but the detrimental consequences of that labour and Lumon’s search for power are displaced away from their immediate workplace, onto (in Season 2) dilapidated factories and their dispossessed workers, political enemies who are stalked and disappeared, child workers, and the inhabitants of the ‘testing floor’, essentially a high-tech torture chamber hidden on secret basement.
Severance serves as a sideways reminder that the bygone physicality of our digital lives — those clunky computer suites and shared IT spaces, all the tangled wires and confusing plug sockets — has not vanished but been displaced.5 It’s easy to imagine that the seamless, smooth, incorporeal immediacy of the digital realm has no physical corollary or consequence. That the Cloud is literally just that — a cloud, intangible and natural and near-invisible — nothing like the physicality of the ‘net’ or ‘web’. It’s comforting to pretend that our digital actions do not have real world consequences, that digital dualism still holds, though the online world has become the primary home of our cyborg selves.
This, obviously, is not true. The environmental and social impact of the technology industry is vast, belching out carbon emissions and dependent on fossil fuels. The data centres which power the Cloud can use up to 5 million gallons of water per day. A rapidly expanding AI infrastructure is particularly catastrophic, a carbon, water, and energy-intensive ‘disaster for the climate’, according to the Guardian. Meanwhile, four of the key minerals used in the manufacture of handheld devices are so contentious they have been termed ‘Conflict minerals’, due to their mining in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, where they are bound up with devastating conflicts and modern slavery. Just because we can’t see this destruction, can’t feel the scorching heat of the computer monitor against our legs, doesn’t mean it isn’t there.
Online too, we are producing digital waste at an exponential rate. ‘Digital decay’ means links often lead to inaccessible or nonexistent websites (like the defunct flash games I played as a child), while ‘digital graveyards’ proliferate as the online profiles of the dead threaten to overtake the living. Meanwhile, Dead Internet Theory, the conspiracy theory that most of the internet is fake, generated by bots and artificial intelligence rather than real people, seems increasingly credible, as Adam Aleksic of The Etymology Nerd has recently argued in a piece on ‘slop capitalism’.6
I’m struck by how much Dead Internet Theory resembles a kind of online Backrooms. The internet broadening out into an infinite expanse of digital space while simultaneously collapsing in on itself, and us. The eerie quality of a dream transforming into a paranoid nightmare. Indeed, the language of Dead Internet Theory, digital decay, and internet graveyards neatly mirrors that of dead malls and other empty physical spaces which exhibit ‘kenopsia’, which were vacated when the world went online. The question this all raises is of course, when the real world is dead and so is the internet, where do we go next?
No wonder the Backrooms hold such imaginative appeal. These are the uncanny dreams of our technodystopia. A world without us, a world where we vanish. A world where we become one with the screen, or where all that is left is the screen. A world from which there is no escape back into ‘reality’. Where the material consequences of the seemingly immaterial make a sudden return and digital dualism collapses entirely, because everything collapses entirely, while the internet flickers on without us, a thousand AI-generated videos reflecting in a thousand black mirrors. A world full of dead, displaced places, the physical and digital corpses our flesh and blood bodies will leave behind.
Twenty-First Century Demoniac is a reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work, consider becoming a subscriber. Paid subscriptions are as little as £2 a month, and are really, hugely appreciated. You can also make a one-off donation through Buy Me A Coffee. You can also buy a copy of my pamphlet SEA GLASS(ES) online from TallFinger Press. And as usual, let me know what you think of this essay (and Severance!) in the comments below.
Just a sidenote that I’ve been lucky enough to meet a few of you in person in the last few months. This has been super lovely, and if you do run into me, please do feel free to say hi!
‘Information and Computer Technology’, which I’ve been informed was just a British term.
Nathan Jurgenson, ‘Digital Dualism and the Fallacy of Web Objectivity’, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2011/09/13/digital-dualism-and-the-fallacy-of-web-objectivity/
Legacy Russell, ‘Digital Dualism and the Glitch Feminism Manifesto’, https://thesocietypages.org/cyborgology/2012/12/10/digital-dualism-and-the-glitch-feminism-manifesto/. Russell is a cyberfeminist and in her book Glitch Feminism makes a great case for how the collapse of digital dualism can have feminist potential in enabling us to shed the constraints of the flesh-and-blood form and create ‘glitches’ in hegemonic systems.
Where the Backrooms loses me is where it errs into the ‘Five Nights At Freddies’ style horror of my childhood. Like the eternal question of whether space is scarier with or without aliens, I think isolation in endless office space is eerie enough without stick figure monsters. Also, do kids still talk about ‘Creepypastas’?
Particularly when you realise that Severance's Lumon is at least partially inspired by Apple, ironically also the company which streams the show.
Back in 2021, the Atlantic described Dead Internet Theory as ‘patently ridiculous’; this, of course, was shortly after the release of DALL-E and just before the 2022 release of Chat-GPT, which launched the AI content boom. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/
This is the kind of essay where you need to stare up at the ceiling after you read it’s
The last paragraph is a hauntingly beautiful. When AI generated content looks line real human created content. We would never know if we are the only human in a dead internet